Scientists have discovered the first solid evidence
of an early African migration wave out of Africa that aimed straight for India,
Asia and Australia. The clue to the 60,000-year-old migration is a natural "tag"
in the microchondrial DNA of people in Ethiopia, India and eastern Asia, say
scientists whose work appears in an issue of the journal Nature Genetics.

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of our cells,
and carry their own DNA which changes at theoretically predictable rates and
can be used to trace lineages of not only the mitochondria, but also the people
who carry them.

"What you have is a pattern (of lineage) emerging,"
says anthropologist Clark Howell from the University of California at Berkeley,
"more explicitly than was the case before."

Over the past several years many researchers have
concentrated on the problem of when humans first left Africa and by what route.
Fossil evidence suggests that the first modern African migration route out of
Africa extended northward around what is now known as the eastern Mediterranean
and Greece more than 100,000 years ago.

But the mitochondrial DNA study is the first evidence
that Africans made their way far beyond Africa and on to the rest of Asia, Australia
and Pacific islands. The emigrants would have probably traveled from then present
day Ethiopia region over a land bridge at the southern end of the Red Sea and
then up through Saudi Arabia.

From there, the emigrants probably kept venturing
east, staying south and away from the very cold northern regions then already
occupied by Neanderthals.

Such a southern emigration route from Africa could
explain how humans occupied Australia so early, says one of the study's authors,
Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti of the University of Pavia in Italy. "I think
that the data seem good," says Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a geneticist from Stanford
University.

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There is a lot of similar research being done and
the full story of early Africa exoduses will probably get clearer very soon
as this work is confirmed by other scientists, he said. These mitochondrial
studies of modern humans are separate from anthropological digs establishing
that extinct ancestors of humans inhabited Africa 4 million years ago.

This report is from December 2, 1999 and is also
listed in the publication journal Nature Genetics.